It is well known that in the field of small products for ingesting, and particularly in the case of sweets in the form of pills, lozenges and the like, various requirements must be satisfied from the packaging point of view.
On the one hand, the package must satisfy rigid hygiene requirements, as it has to contain the articles to be distributed without these, in the majority of cases being individually wrapped and protected by paper or the like. On the other hand these sweets are normally of very low cost, because of which the package must not heavily influence the cost of the article to be sold, if it is not to lose its competitive aspect.
Finally the appearance of the package is important, and this is particularly so for the commercialization of the product.
Up to the present time the most usual packages for the articles in question consisted of tubes provided with a screwed or pressure fitted lid, or boxes provided with a hinged lid, either being normally constructed by pressing light metal.
Containers are also known in which the lid is slidable or rotatable with respect to the body of the container so as to uncover a delivery slot.
Recently moulded in plastic containers have come into use, being of substantially parallelopiped shape and provided with a lid hinged to one of the minor bases of the parallelopiped and which partially closes the base.
All the packages heretofore mentioned require a separate non-automatic operation for their closure after the delivery of one or more articles.
Furthermore with use, the closure device of the lids or the like may become damaged or otherwise be no longer satisfactory.